In an essay entitled "Thornton Wilder says Yes," theatre critic
and historian Bernard Hewitt asks us to see in Thornton Wilder's
greatest plays a profound affirmation of life. He christens
Wilder's best-known play, Our Town, a "hymn to the
humdrum," pointing to the way in which the everyday is elevated to
the sacred. In The Matchmaker, Hewitt sees a celebration
of the "radical, the pioneering, the exploring, the creative spirit
in man . . . a lively song in praise of adventure." In both plays,
he points to the presence of "something eternal" running
through them.

Hiding out in the double takes, mistaken identities and
reconciliations of The Matchmaker is an unmistakable sense
of awe at the human spirit - in particular (but not exclusively)
when Wilder is writing about young people. It's this sense of awe
that makes the comedy of the piece shine with a special intensity.
The Matchmaker affirms the beautiful folly of life and
love, while at the same time avoiding sentimentality with a
ten-foot pole. It is also about personal and social transformation.
It recognizes that we are connected to each other in ways that are
not always apparent to us. This view of human interdependency
appears throughout Wilder's body of work as well as his view of the
theatre. In Hewitt's words, Wilder "recognizes and accepts the fact
that theatre is a collaborative art, that director and actors
necessarily intervene their bodies, minds, and imaginations between
the playwright and his vision of his play."

Wilder's humility and wisdom about the theatre are evident not
only in his journals and letters but also in the complex history of
The Matchmaker's development from its initial ill-fated
1938 production as The Merchant of Yonkers to the revised
and re-titled 1954 version. The ingenious contributions of Wilder's
collaborators are very much in evidence in the prompt script of
Tyrone Guthrie's legendary 1954 production of The
Matchmaker. It points to a depth of complicity between writer,
director, designer and acting company that I always strive for in
my work. The acting edition, based on Guthrie's production, was a
principal source of inspiration for me. It gave me a window into
Guthrie's inventive proscenium mise-en-scène, as well as
into the restless perfectionism of the director and writer. Our
production on the Festival's thrust stage is in many ways deeply
indebted to and influenced by the genius of its first director.

It is because I came to understand just how much consideration
and fine tuning the writer did in rehearsal for The
Matchmaker that we decided to look at three different versions
of the play, ultimately preparing a text that draws from Guthrie's
prompt script, the published play and the published edition of
The Merchant of Yonkers. I am tremendously grateful to
Wilder's nephew and literary executor, Tappan Wilder, for
sensitively and graciously allowing us to nose around the three
versions of the play in search of further insights and omitted
gems. It is with great pleasure that we have been able to
re-encounter The Merchant of Yonkers and discover just how
much the success of The Matchmaker owes to its initial
inception. Who knows why plays don't always work the first time
around? Sometimes it's the play, sometimes it's the director, the
times, the cast. But more often than not, I think, plays deserve a
second chance. The Matchmaker got that second chance, and
we are so much the richer for it. I hope you'll enjoy it as much as
I have.

Giving Horace His Due
Program notes by James Magruder

In Book Two of Democracy in America (1840), Alexis de
Toqueville opines: "There are no dramatic subjects in a country
which has witnessed no great political catastrophes and in which
love invariably leads by a straight and easy road to matrimony.
People who spend every day in the week in making money, and the
Sunday in going to church, have nothing to invite the Muse of
Comedy."

Toqueville remains distressingly current about too many aspects
of the American scene, but here, on the subject of theatre, he's
wrong for once. Although he can be excused the jibe about America
having "no great political catastrophes," as the Civil War is
twenty years in the future, he clearly doesn't realize that "people
who spend every day in the week in making money" are practically
begging Thalia to throw a banana peel under their wingtips. He must
not have met on his travels through the young republic the
ancestors of David Mamet's Richard Roma in Glengarry Glen
Ross or Thornton Wilder's Horace Vandergelder, the title
character of The Merchant of Yonkers, the 1938 play Wilder
would later revise as The Matchmaker.

Apropos of the Merchant-in-vitro, Wilder wrote to Ruth
Gordon, the actress whose Dolly Levi would eventually filch the
play's title away from Horace: "I've been reading all the great
'formal' comedies in every language: Molière and Goldoni, and
Lessing - just to make sure that I've expunged every lurking
vestige of what Sam Behrman and George Kaufman think comedy
is."

S.N. Behrman wrote mild comedies of manners and Kaufman traded
in satire. Wilder, typically, is looking beyond the drawing room
and the topical headlines that fuelled the work of these
commercially successful playwrights in order to drink from the
deepest possible dramatic well. (That he could read the three
authors he mentions in their original languages is already wildly
un-American.) He knew that money has been one of the three comic
motivators since the Greeks. To craft his "formal" farce, Wilder
hews Horace out of classical bedrock, borrows features from his
dramatic sources - plays by Oxenford and Nestroy - and then
finishes the surface with the vernacular and values of
nineteenth-century American thrift.

The first line in the play is a deliberate nod to ancient comic
laws:

HORACE: (loudly) "I tell you for the hundredth time you
will never marry my niece."

Horaces always say that; but then the laws of comedy take over
and prove them wrong at the end of a single crazy day. An obstacle
to love and freedom, blind to his effect on others, Vandergelder is
every fiscal conservative who's trod the boards since Euclio in
Plautus's Pot of Gold circa 200 BC.

Wilder shrewdly keeps Horace in the middle of the socioeconomic
scale: a merchant is a more imposing Yankee than a shopkeeper, but
he's less than a tycoon. Vandergelder remains in daily physical
contact with the source of his livelihood, and he still keeps the
books. In America, whose limitless resources and less strictured
society made it the Land of Get Rich Quick practically from its
discovery, Vandergelder got rich slow. His fortune is the reward of
getting up at five in the morning six days a week and shutting the
store at ten at night.

But this morning is different. Vandergelder has put aside "the
last dollar of his first half million" and is looking for a second
wife, both to run the house and, he will grudgingly concede, to
risk a little romantic foolishness. Should he lose his head in the
process, he figures he has enough money to buy it back. Enter Dolly
Gallagher Levi: matchmaker and a near relation to Wilder's other
brilliant "Stage Manager" characters. She too bears classical
lineage. In tragedy, she's the nutrix or nurse figure who
tends to purvey catastrophic advice to her mistress. ("Why not tell
your stepson, Phaedra, that you're in love with him?" is a shining
example.) In commedia dell'arte and its scripted
descendants, she is the brainy Colombina, who abets young lovers
and thwarts tyrannical fathers.

Putatively engaged in finding him a wife, Dolly decides to save
Horace for her own good - and, more important, for his own good.
When Wilder began writing the play in the mid-1930s, the world was
slowly emerging from the Great Depression. Western societies had
been flirting - and their literatures flirting more seriously still
- with the socialist economic alternative. Though Dolly is a
realist who knows that two and two make four, life has endowed her
with a suspicious counter-wisdom and a project: letting Horace's
wealth flow like "rain water amongst the dressmakers and
restaurants and cabmen," with herself as spigot.

Dolly's challenge generates a lot of laughter, but Wilder
doesn't soothe his audience with the stage bromides that so
fatigued his spirit and intellect as a young theatregoer. The
Matchmaker does not say that money won't buy happiness. Or
that you can live on love. The two younger couples in the play
might think so, but Dolly knows better: "Yes, we're all fools and
we're all in danger of destroying the world with our folly. But the
surest way to keep us out of harm is to give us the four or five
human pleasures that are our right in the world - and that takes a
little money!"

Dolly's pleasure principle is a powerful counterweight to
Horace's dour life of Dutch-American industry and thrift. Her
campaign to redeem Horace over a chicken dinner at the Harmonia
Gardens - served with farcical stage business, reverse psychology
and the telling of some hard truths - is the emotional linchpin of
the play and a high spot in American comedy. Can Horace be made to
dance again? Can he move his feet to the tune of something larger
than himself?

Productions fail every season for mysterious reasons, and
The Merchant of Yonkers flopped loudly in its 1938
première. Was it Max Reinhardt's sluggish direction, or the
miscasting of Jane Cowl as Dolly, or general misperception on the
part of the critics who weren't expecting an old-fashioned farce
from the philosophical playwright who had just given the world
Our Town?

But, like Horace himself, the play got a second chance. At the
invitation of the Stratford Festival's first Artistic Director,
Tyrone Guthrie, Wilder came here in the early 1950s and began
re-working the play for Ruth Gordon. According to Christopher
Plummer and the late Michael Langham, Guthrie sent Wilder to work
in the prop shop when he was bored with the writing process.
Re-titled The Matchmaker, it was a runaway hit at the
Edinburgh Festival in 1954 under Guthrie's quicksilver direction.
It quickly transferred first to the West End, then to Broadway in
December 1955, where it settled in for a long run before being
adapted into the musical Hello, Dolly! in 1964.

"Medan agan" reads one of the legends carved on the
Temple of Apollo at Delphi. It means "nothing in excess" and is one
of the touchstones of Greek civilization. The ancient authors
decreed that the function of comedy is to correct, through
painstaking observation, the excesses of behaviour in the average
man. Medan agan. Just enough money. Just enough change.
And just, as Barnaby says at play's end, the right amount of
adventure. That Dolly and Horace are able to come together as
partners is the happiest adventure in the play, whether it's called
The Merchant of Yonkers or The Matchmaker.

James Magruder is a novelist, translator, theatre scholar,
professor and dramaturge.